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Denial of Service (DoS) attacks pose a significant threat in the realm of AI systems security, causing substantial financial losses and downtime. However, AI systems' high computational demands, dynamic behavior, and data variability make monitoring and detecting DoS attacks challenging. Nowadays, statistical and machine learning (ML)-based DoS classification and detection approaches utilize a broad range of feature selection mechanisms to select a feature subset from networking traffic datasets. Feature selection is critical in enhancing the overall model performance and attack detection accuracy while reducing the training time. In this paper, we investigate the importance of feature selection in improving ML-based detection of DoS attacks. Specifically, we explore feature contribution to the overall components in DoS traffic datasets by utilizing statistical analysis and feature engineering approaches. Our experimental findings demonstrate the usefulness of the thorough statistical analysis of DoS traffic and feature engineering in understanding the behavior of the attack and identifying the best feature selection for ML-based DoS classification and detection., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, IEEE VTC2024-Fall

Automated scraping stands out as a common method for collecting data in deep learning models without the authorization of data owners. Recent studies have begun to tackle the privacy concerns associated with this data collection method. Notable approaches include Deepconfuse, error-minimizing, error-maximizing (also known as adversarial poisoning), Neural Tangent Generalization Attack, synthetic, autoregressive, One-Pixel Shortcut, Self-Ensemble Protection, Entangled Features, Robust Error-Minimizing, Hypocritical, and TensorClog. The data generated by those approaches, called "unlearnable" examples, are prevented "learning" by deep learning models. In this research, we investigate and devise an effective nonlinear transformation framework and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that a deep neural network can effectively learn from the data/examples traditionally considered unlearnable produced by the above twelve approaches. The resulting approach improves the ability to break unlearnable data compared to the linear separable technique recently proposed by researchers. Specifically, our extensive experiments show that the improvement ranges from 0.34% to 249.59% for the unlearnable CIFAR10 datasets generated by those twelve data protection approaches, except for One-Pixel Shortcut. Moreover, the proposed framework achieves over 100% improvement of test accuracy for Autoregressive and REM approaches compared to the linear separable technique. Our findings suggest that these approaches are inadequate in preventing unauthorized uses of data in machine learning models. There is an urgent need to develop more robust protection mechanisms that effectively thwart an attacker from accessing data without proper authorization from the owners.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose an increasingly substantial cybersecurity threat to organizations across the globe. In this paper, we introduce a new deep learning-based technique for detecting DDoS attacks, a paramount cybersecurity challenge with evolving complexity and scale. Specifically, we propose a new dual-space prototypical network that leverages a unique dual-space loss function to enhance detection accuracy for various attack patterns through geometric and angular similarity measures. This approach capitalizes on the strengths of representation learning within the latent space (a lower-dimensional representation of data that captures complex patterns for machine learning analysis), improving the model's adaptability and sensitivity towards varying DDoS attack vectors. Our comprehensive evaluation spans multiple training environments, including offline training, simulated online training, and prototypical network scenarios, to validate the model's robustness under diverse data abundance and scarcity conditions. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with Attention, trained with our dual-space prototypical design over a reduced training set, achieves an average accuracy of 94.85% and an F1-Score of 94.71% across our tests, showcasing its effectiveness in dynamic and constrained real-world scenarios., Comment: 9 pages, The 33rd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2024)

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a significant threat to the stability and reliability of online systems. Effective and early detection of such attacks is pivotal for safeguarding the integrity of networks. In this work, we introduce an enhanced approach for DDoS attack detection by leveraging the capabilities of Deep Residual Neural Networks (ResNets) coupled with synthetic oversampling techniques. Because of the inherent class imbalance in many cyber-security datasets, conventional methods often struggle with false negatives, misclassifying subtle DDoS patterns as benign. By applying the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to the CICIDS dataset, we balance the representation of benign and malicious data points, enabling the model to better discern intricate patterns indicative of an attack. Our deep residual network, tailored for this specific task, further refines the detection process. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves an accuracy of 99.98%, significantly outperforming traditional methods. This work underscores the potential of combining advanced data augmentation techniques with deep learning models to bolster cyber-security defenses., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), previously favored by enthusiasts, have evolved into indispensable tools for effectively managing disasters and responding to emergencies. For example, one of their most critical applications is to provide seamless wireless communication services in remote rural areas. Thus, it is substantial to identify and consider the different security challenges in the research and development associated with advanced UAV-based B5G/6G architectures. Following this requirement, the present study thoroughly examines the security considerations about UAVs in relation to the architectural framework of the 5G/6G system, the technologies that facilitate its operation, and the concerns surrounding privacy. It exhibits security integration at all the protocol stack layers and analyzes the existing mechanisms to secure UAV-based B5G/6G communications and its energy and power optimization factors. Last, this article also summarizes modern technological trends for establishing security and protecting UAV-based systems, along with the open challenges and strategies for future research work., Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables

Visual homing is a lightweight approach to visual navigation. Given the stored information of an initial 'home' location, the navigation task back to this location is achieved from any other location by comparing the stored home information to the current image and extracting a motion vector. A challenge that constrains the applicability of visual homing is that the home location must be within the robot's field of view to initiate the homing process. Thus, we propose a blockchain approach to visual navigation for a heterogeneous robot team over a wide area of visual navigation. Because it does not require map data structures, the approach is useful for robot platforms with a small computational footprint, and because it leverages current visual information, it supports a resilient and adaptive path selection. Further, we present a lightweight Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism for reaching consensus in the untrustworthy visual homing network., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Mitigating Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks is vital for online service security and availability. While machine learning (ML) models are used for DoS attack detection, new strategies are needed to enhance their performance. We suggest an innovative method, combinatorial fusion, which combines multiple ML models using advanced algorithms. This includes score and rank combinations, weighted techniques, and diversity strength of scoring systems. Through rigorous evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this fusion approach, considering metrics like precision, recall, and F1-score. We address the challenge of low-profiled attack classification by fusing models to create a comprehensive solution. Our findings emphasize the potential of this approach to improve DoS attack detection and contribute to stronger defense mechanisms., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, IEEE CNS

As Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly used in solving various tasks in real-world applications, it is crucial to ensure that ML algorithms are robust to any potential worst-case noises, adversarial attacks, and highly unusual situations when they are designed. Studying ML robustness will significantly help in the design of ML algorithms. In this paper, we investigate ML robustness using adversarial training in centralized and decentralized environments, where ML training and testing are conducted in one or multiple computers. In the centralized environment, we achieve a test accuracy of 65.41% and 83.0% when classifying adversarial examples generated by Fast Gradient Sign Method and DeepFool, respectively. Comparing to existing studies, these results demonstrate an improvement of 18.41% for FGSM and 47% for DeepFool. In the decentralized environment, we study Federated learning (FL) robustness by using adversarial training with independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data, respectively, where CIFAR-10 is used in this research. In the IID data case, our experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve such a robust accuracy that it is comparable to the one obtained in the centralized environment. Moreover, in the non-IID data case, the natural accuracy drops from 66.23% to 57.82%, and the robust accuracy decreases by 25% and 23.4% in C&W and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attacks, compared to the IID data case, respectively. We further propose an IID data-sharing approach, which allows for increasing the natural accuracy to 85.04% and the robust accuracy from 57% to 72% in C&W attacks and from 59% to 67% in PGD attacks.

Many state-of-the-art ML models have outperformed humans in various tasks such as image classification. With such outstanding performance, ML models are widely used today. However, the existence of adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks really questions the robustness of ML models. For instance, Engstrom et al. demonstrated that state-of-the-art image classifiers could be easily fooled by a small rotation on an arbitrary image. As ML systems are being increasingly integrated into safety and security-sensitive applications, adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks pose a considerable threat. This chapter focuses on the two broad and important areas of ML security: adversarial attacks and data poisoning attacks.

Many researchers have studied false data injection (FDI) attacks in power state estimation, but existing state estimation approaches are still highly vulnerable to FDI attacks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of the above three FDI attacks against dynamic power state estimation (DSE). Although the three attacks were discovered in SSE several years ago, none of them has been well addressed in static power state systems. In this research, we propose two robust defense approaches against the above three efficient FDI attacks on DSE. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed approaches have three major differences and significant strengths: (1) they defend against the three FDI attacks on dynamic power state estimation rather than static power state estimation, (2) they give a robust estimator that can accurately extract a subset of attack-free sensors for power state estimation, and (3) they adopt the little-known Mahalanobis distance in the consistency check of power sensor measurements, which is different from the Euclidean distance used in all the existing studies on power state estimation. We mathematically prove that the Mahalanobis distance is not only useful but also much better than the Euclidean distance in the consistency check of power sensor measurements. Our time complexity analysis shows that the two proposed robust defense approaches are efficient. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, we compare them with the three well-known approaches: the least square approach, the Imhotep-SMT approach, and the MEE-UKF approach. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approaches further reduce the estimation error by two orders of magnitude and four orders of magnitude compared to the Imhotep-SMT approach and the least square approach, respectively. Moreover, our approach is more stable than the MEE-UKF approach.

Deep neural networks usually require large labeled datasets for training to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks, such as image classification and natural language processing. Although a lot of data is created each day by active Internet users, most of these data are unlabeled and are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this paper, we develop an efficient active learning method that requires fewer labeled instances and incorporates the technique of adversarial retraining in which additional labeled artificial data are generated without increasing the budget of the labeling. The generated adversarial examples also provide a way to measure the vulnerability of the model. To check the performance of the proposed method under an adversarial setting, i.e., malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks, we perform an extensive evaluation on the reduced CIFAR-10 dataset, which contains only two classes: airplane and frog. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed active learning method is efficient for defending against malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks. Specifically, whereas the baseline active learning method based on the random sampling strategy performs poorly (about 50%) under a malicious mislabeling attack, the proposed active learning method can achieve the desired accuracy of 89% using only one-third of the dataset on average., Comment: 2021 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)

In a modern vehicle, there are over seventy Electronics Control Units (ECUs). For an in-vehicle network, ECUs communicate with each other by following a standard communication protocol, such as Controller Area Network (CAN). However, an attacker can easily access the in-vehicle network to compromise ECUs through a WLAN or Bluetooth. Though there are various deep learning (DL) methods suggested for securing in-vehicle networks, recent studies on adversarial examples have shown that attackers can easily fool DL models. In this research, we further explore adversarial examples in an in-vehicle network. We first discover and implement two adversarial attack models that are harmful to a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based detection model used in the in-vehicle network. Then, we propose an Adversarial Attack Defending System (AADS) for securing an in-vehicle network. Specifically, we focus on brake-related ECUs in an in-vehicle network. Our experimental results demonstrate that adversaries can easily attack the LSTM-based detection model with a success rate of over 98%, and the proposed AADS achieves over 99% accuracy for detecting adversarial attacks., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Autonomous Vehicle has been transforming intelligent transportation systems. As telecommunication technology improves, autonomous vehicles are getting connected to each other and to infrastructures, forming Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). CAVs will help humans achieve safe, efficient, and autonomous transportation systems. However, CAVs will face significant security challenges because many of their components are vulnerable to attacks, and a successful attack on a CAV may have significant impacts on other CAVs and infrastructures due to their communications. In this paper, we conduct a survey on 184 papers from 2000 to 2020 to understand state-of-the-art CAV attacks and defense techniques. This survey first presents a comprehensive overview of security attacks and their corresponding countermeasures on CAVs. We then discuss the details of attack models based on the targeted CAV components of attacks, access requirements, and attack motives. Finally, we identify some current research challenges and trends from the perspectives of both academic research and industrial development. Based on our studies of academic literature and industrial publications, we have not found any strong connection between academic research and industry's implementation on CAV-related security issues. While efforts from CAV manufacturers to secure CAVs have been reported, there is no evidence to show that CAVs on the market have the ability to defend against some novel attack models that the research community has recently found. This survey may give researchers and engineers a better understanding of the current status and trend of CAV security for CAV future improvement.